The invention relates to a regenerable electric layer capacitor in which at least two opposite polarity metal layers and a dielectric layer consisting of a glow (gas discharge) polymerization are applied to a substrate. The metal layers and the dielectric layer are of equal coverage, are designed in the form of a parallelogram and are applied laterally offset with respect to one another. The respective metal layers of each polarity are contacted at two edges lying opposite one another along contact strips.
Such a capacitor is already known. In this capacitor, two anti-polar metallizations lie above one another with identical edges and are separated from one another only by means of a dielectric layer. Accordingly, flash-overs arise in the area of the edges and, although they are healed due to the regenerability of the coatings, a relatively broad strip of the coatings is destroyed before a sufficient insulation is produced.
Moreover, the dielectric layers fundamentally exhibit a weakening in the area of their lateral boundaries, this weakening not being avoidable in the manufacturing processes for glow polymerization layers known up to now.
It is already known from German Utility Model 1,965,296, incorporated herein by reference, to design such layers in a trapezoid shape and to arrange them offset in the direction perpendicular to the mutually parallel sides of the trapezoid. Such a capacitor, however of necessity makes relatively little use of the surface of the substrate, since, on the one hand, given a small deviation of the trapezoid from the rectangular shape, a relatively large mutual displacement of the individual layers is required in order to obtain the required insulating strip at the diagonal trapezoid sides. On the other hand, given a great deviation from the rectangular shape, the contacting at the shorter of the mutually parallel edges of the trapezoid which, by so doing become very short, becomes problematic. If, on the other hand, the interval between the mutually parallel trapezoid edges is selected so as to be very small in order to assure sufficient contacting, then the width of the contact strip already becomes considerable in comparison to the capacitively effective width. Again, a very low exploitation of the substrate surface results.
If such capacitors are to be sold individually, i.e. are not to be integrated in film circuits, then, for reasons of fabrication technology, one strives to see that two opposite sides of the component are respectively parallel to one another so that the separating device can be simply designed. Given a capacitor according to the prior art, this leads to a further reduction of the substrate surface used.